Monday, April 13, 2015

Daghestan Now ‘Northern Front of Islamic State’

Paul
Goble

Staunton, April 13 – Statements by
Russian security officials and actions by siloviki including declaring a new
counter-terrorism operation against an area of 4500 square kilometers with some
368,000 people show that Daghestan has become “the northern front” of the
Islamic State, according to Anton Bredikhin.

Senior FSB officials have identified
North Caucasians among the senior commanders of ISIS and have suggested that “no
less than” 1700 Russian citizens are now fighting with that force, almost all
of whom are from the North Caucasus and especially from Daghestan, the most
Muslim of Russia’s southern republics.

This statistic by itself, Bredikhin
says, “means only one thing: the next goal of the Islamic State can be the
Caucasus and its most currently unstable part – Daghestan.”

For the last three weeks, Russian
siloviki have been conducting a counter-terrorist operation in six adjoining
regions of Daghestan: Buynaksk, Novolak, Kazbek, Khasavyurt, and Kizilyurt,
areas that include not only highland rural areas but the cities of Buynaksk,
Kizilyurt and Khasavyurt as well.

The scale of
the operation suggests, the analyst says, citing the work of Akhmet Yarlykapov,
a scholar at the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, that the
Russian force structures have “operational information” about the appearance in
Daghestan of former militants of the Islamic State.

Sergey Melikov,
the presidential plenipotentiary for the North Caucasus, adds that “we are
receiving information about the recruiters of the so-called ‘Islamic State’
appearing in our higher educational institutions, and this means that that the
authorities … must devote close attention to the extra-curricular activities of
students.”

Students
because of their stage of life are attractive candidates for recruitment, he
suggests. Others, like Aleksandr Perendzhiyev of the Association of Independent
Military Political Analysts, say that the Islamic State is quite familiar with
the presence of Wahhabism and radicalism in the North Caucasus and Daghestan “above
all.”

Bredikhin says that Russian official figures confirm the
increasing activity of militants in Daghestan: between 2010 and 2014, the
number of terrorist crimes there went up from 63 to 472, the number of people
identified as having committed them from 36 to 251, the number of extremist
crimes from five to 50, and the number of people identified as having committed
them from one to twelve.

So
far, the ISIS-linked groups are less well-organized and aggressive than the
Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion which has gained fame for its fight against
pro-Moscow forces in Ukraine. But whether this will remain the case is very
much an open question, the North Caucasus analyst says.

But
regardless of how limited the threat appears to some in Chechnya and Moscow now,
“that ‘a Northern Front’ of ISIS has been opened in Daghestan is a confirmed
fact.” And Daghestan isultimately only
a small part of the problem, Bredikhin says.

The
ISIS returnees have formed “a straight line of instability” between the Islamic
State, the Pankisi Gorge, and Daghestan. Whether it will intensify and spread
further depends, he suggests, on what Moscow does next. But the center’s task
is clear: it must “strengthen its positions in the Caucasus and the Near East”
in order to protect Russian territory.